Fox's Obama Expert Fears Jews

Andy Martin is the habitual politician and "researcher" who created the original smear of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim in a 2004 press release, begetting a mutating series of email forwards still coursing through the internet. Last week, he was featured in a Fox News special that, in the words of the Times, "allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government." But, hey, Martin isn't just worried about Obama and Islam, he's also deathly afraid of the Jews! The Times' Jim Ruttenberg dug into Martin's anti-Semitisim in this morning's paper after Martin tried to deny and brush off the issue last week:

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that "Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome," he said, "That one sort of rings a bell."

He said he was not anti-Semitic. "I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish," he said, "and I was being victimized by religious bias."

Also, in 1993, Martin told CBS News' 48 Hours "the record speaks for itself" when asked about a 1983 statement in court papers that "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did."

None of Martin's statements are hugely surprising once you know that the law-school graduate was in 1970 denied entry to the Illinois bar on psychiatric grounds, specifically "moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character."

But, really, would Fox News' Sean Hannity have barred Martin from his special even if he'd known about that diagnosis? It's practically his own job description!